Woman gets 15 years for shooting ex-fiance

Wednesday

Jun 22, 2011 at 12:01 AMJun 22, 2011 at 9:18 AM

He took a bullet in the face, lost his left eye and endured four operations, but Jamie J. Hart was in a Franklin County courtroom yesterday to confront the ex-fiancee who tried to take his life in a Dublin parking lot last year.

He took a bullet in the face, lost his left eye and endured four operations, but Jamie J. Hart was in a Franklin County courtroom yesterday to confront the ex-fiancee who tried to take his life in a Dublin parking lot last year.

"She left me dying on the ground, and yet today I'm the one standing up," he said at the sentencing hearing for Melissa Stredney, 30.

"I will go on living my life while Melissa contemplates how she wasted hers."

Common Pleas Judge Richard S. Sheward sentenced Stredney to 15 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to felonious assault and tampering with evidence. The sentence was recommended by the prosecution and defense as part of a plea agreement.

Assistant Prosecutor David Zeyen said Stredney confronted Hart in the parking lot of NCO Financial Systems on Frantz Road as he arrived for work on the morning of Dec. 14. She tried to force him into her car at gunpoint and shot him in the face when he refused.

She threw the handgun from the window of her car as she fled and was stopped by Dublin police less than a mile away.

Stredney's mental illness was among the reasons that Hart had called off their wedding plans, Zeyen said.

She purchased the gun a week before the shooting and asked police to show her how to use it, claiming she had been a burglary victim and needed to protect herself.

Stredney, of Warren, Ohio, made a lengthy statement in court, saying she had been under a psychiatrist's care for 19 years but "no one knows what's wrong with me."

She asked for forgiveness, but the closest she came to an apology was when she said, "I'm sorry that it had to come this far to get the help that I needed."

Hart, 30, told the judge that "anger, rage and self-pity have turned the defendant into the monster we all see here today."

He said after the hearing that he was "quite shocked" not to hear an apology.